Crossposted with TomDispatch.com
This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time. The monsters they serve demand that we ravage the planet and impoverish most human beings so that they might thrive. They’re like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, like the Terminators, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that those were on the screen and these are in our actual world.
We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate, which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you.
The results are near-invincible bodies, the most gigantic of which are oil companies, larger than blue whales, larger than dinosaurs, larger than Godzilla. Last year, Shell, BP, and Exxon were three of the top four mega-corporations by sales on the Fortune Global 500 list (and Chevron came in eighth). Some of the oil companies are well over a century old, having morphed and split and merged while continuing to pump filth into the air, the water, and the bodies of the many -- and profits into the pockets of the few.
Thanks to a Supreme Court decision this January, they have the same rights as you when it comes to putting money into the political process, only they’re millions of times larger than you -- and they’re pumping millions of dollars into races nationwide. It’s like inviting a T. Rex into your checkers championship -- and it doesn’t matter whether dinosaurs can play checkers, at least not once you’re being pulverized by their pointy teeth.
The amazing thing is that they don’t always win, that sometimes thousands of puny mammals -- that’s us -- do overwhelm one of them.
Gigantic, powerful, undead beings, corporations have been given ever more human rights over the past 125 years; they act on their own behalf, not mine or yours or humanity’s or, really, carbon-based life on Earth’s. We’re made out of carbon, of course, but we depend on a planet where much of the carbon is locked up in the earth. The profit margins of the oil corporations depend on putting as much as possible of that carbon into the atmosphere.
So in a lot of basic ways, we are at odds with these creations. The novelist John le Carré remarked earlier this month, “The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done -- dare I say it -- in the name of God." Corporations have their jihads and crusades too, since they subscribe to a religion of maximum profit for themselves, and they’ll kill to achieve it. In an odd way, shareholders and god have merged in the weird new religion of unfettered capitalism, the one in which regulation is blasphemy and profit is sacred. Thus, the economic jihads of our age.
They Fund By Night!
In the jihad that concerns me right now, most of the monsters come from Texas; the prey is in California; and it’s called our economy and our environment. Four years ago, with state Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, we Californians decided we’d like to cultivate our environment for the benefit of all of us, human and biological, now and in the long future.
They’d like to pillage it to keep their profit margins in tip-top shape this year and next. The latest tool to do this is called Proposition 23, and it’s on our ballot on Nov. 2. It is wholly destructive, cloaked in lies, and benefits no one -- no one human, that is, though it benefits the oil corporations a lot. (You could argue that it benefits their shareholders, but I’d suggest that their biological and moral nature matters more than their bank accounts do and that, as a consequence, they’re acting against their deepest interests and their humanity.)
When he signed AB 32 into law, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s totally weird, termed out, but really good on climate stuff, said:
Some have challenged whether AB 32 is good for businesses. I say unquestionably it is good for businesses. Not only large, well-established businesses, but small businesses that will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to help us achieve our climate goals. Using market-based incentives, we will reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. That's a 25% reduction. And by 2050, we will reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels. We simply must do everything in our power to slow down global warming before it's too late.
With Proposition 23, two out-of-state oil corporations, Valero and Tesoro, and right-wing oil billionaires based in New York and Kansas are trying to use the California initiative process, originally intended to allow citizen intervention in the governance of this state, to countermand AB 32 and set policy for us. “According to data from the California Secretary of State's office,” Kate Sheppard recently reported in Mother Jones magazine:
More than 98% of contributions to the pro-Prop. 23 campaign are from oil companies. Eighty-nine percent of the contributions come from out of state… Valero contributed $4 million, Tesoro gave $1.5 million, and a refinery owned by the notorious Kansas-based billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, kicked in another $1 million. Just last week, Houston-based Marathon oil contributed $500,000.
Actually, Tesoro and Valero are headquartered out of state, but their refineries in California gave us 2.4 million pounds of toxic chemicals in our air and water last year, and they’d like to continue offering the citizens of my state these gifts that keep giving illness, death and long-term environmental devastation without interference. The coming vote is not about protecting fancy places for upscale hikers -- the stereotype used to portray environmentalism as a white-person’s luxury movement -- it’s about air quality for inner-city people, especially those who live near refineries and harbors. This is the kind of environmental degradation that’s about childhood asthma and increased deaths from respiratory illness. In other words, Prop. 23 is part of a corporate war on the poor. A vote for Prop. 23 is a vote to turn the lungs of poor children into a snack for dinosaurs, to put it in bluntly Hollywood-ish terms.
Lies of the Living Dead
To sabotage AB 32, they’re spending lots and lots of money and telling lots and lots of lies. Start with the proposition’s name -- “The California Jobs Initiative” -- designed to make you think that this measure will create jobs. Actually, according to most reputable analyses, it will do the opposite. A green economy has made jobs, is making jobs, and will make more jobs. This stealth initiative would suspend AB 32 until unemployment in California drops below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters, which it won’t anytime soon, if ever.
The implication is that doing something about climate change is a luxury we cannot afford in this bleak economy. That’s a lie. Down the road, if we don’t retool to address a future in which there’s less petroleum (at far higher prices), we’ll truly crash and the suffering will be intense. AB 32 would prevent that crash; Prop. 23 steers us directly into it.
The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.
Doing something about climate change makes economic sense right now. It’s good business.
It’s hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy. After all, oil corporations funded a lot of the disinformation campaigns which, for years, promoted the idea that human-caused climate change was a figment of the overheated imaginations of mad environmentalists, and later that there was controversy (as well as corruption) among scientists when it came to global warming. The only honest information would have been that about 97 percent of the world’s relevant scientists overwhelming agree that climate change couldn’t be more real and is a genuine danger to humanity and the planet -- and that the evidence is all around us in freakish weather, rising oceans, melting arctic ice and glaciers, shifting habitats, and more.
The Phantom of Democracy
The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes. In the 1970s, we started setting energy-efficiency standards that mean we Californians now use about half the energy of the average American (with no diminishment of quality of life or pocketbook pain). In the last decade, we created cutting-edge measures to curb carbon emissions.
In 2002, Los Angeles state assemblywoman Fran Pavley (now a state senator) put out AB 1493, which was to -- and will -- reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions. It was, unfortunately, held up for six years by the Bush administration and then transformed into a national standard by Barack Obama as one of his first acts in office. Pavley also authored the now embattled “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” AB 32.
If you think oil corporations and life share an interest, you should’ve been in the Gulf of Mexico a few months ago. I was. I saw their oiled pelicans, their unemployed fishermen, and their oil-smeared marshes. I tasted and smelled the poisons I could not see, and I read their lies.
The people of the Gulf will struggle to survive the recklessness of BP for decades to come, but the petrobeasts aren’t just destructive when things go wrong; they’re that way when things go according to plan as well. If the 5.5 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf, thanks to BP, had instead made it to our gas tanks, the consequences would still have been dire. They are dire. The companies funding Prop. 23 are themselves a major source of climate change and, of course, a major obstacle to coming up with solutions to it.
Like the people of the Gulf during the spill, the people of Richmond, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, live with those tastes, smells, and consequences all the time, because they’re in the shadow of Chevron’s biggest west coast refinery. (Corporate headquarters are only 25 miles away.) Sirens go off during excessive leaks of toxins like ammonia, and as if out of a horror movie, an explosion at the plant in 1999 that sent an 18,000-pound plume of sulfur dioxide fumes into the air was said to be so nasty it took the fur off squirrels.
Chevron is one of the biggest corporations on the planet. While the average income for a human being in Richmond is a little more than $19,000, Chevron’s profits last year were $24 billion, meaning the corporation is more than one million times as rich as the average citizen there. Nonetheless, the humans there won a huge victory recently, preventing the corporation from expanding and retooling its refinery so that it could process even dirtier crude oil (with dirtier local emissions, in a place that already suffers huge health consequences from the monster in its backyard). It may be the world’s first victory against refinery expansion.
Chevron is both the state’s biggest single greenhouse-gas emitter and a huge financial force in Richmond elections, invariably funding campaigns against green candidates. The mostly poor, mostly nonwhite citizens of Richmond are, however, organized and motivated, so if you want to watch a monster movie in which the little guys have been winning lately, follow city politics there.
One of the cool things about the West County Toxics Coalition, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Green Party mayor, and the activists working with them is that they know better than anyone how to act locally and think globally, and even sometimes how to act globally and think locally. Maybe collectively they’re not so little. They’re allied with antiwar groups, with Burmese human rights groups, with the people of Ecuador and Nigeria who have suffered petro-contamination at least as bad, if not worse than BP’s Gulf spill this spring, with groups around the world fighting the petrobeast. There’s a movement out there, and sometimes it even wins amazing victories.
Around the world this month, 350.org coordinated more than 7,000 demonstrations in favor of lowering atmospheric carbon to a sane 350 parts per million, while the climate-justice movement had a global day of action on Columbus Day. Among the month's heroic efforts were direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, blockades of refineries in France and Britain and of a coal-fired power plant in Germany, protests and gas-station blockades in Canada, and a rally in the Philippines, a demonstration in Finland, a march in Ecuador, a protest in South Africa, among others. In California, activists worked steadily against Prop. 23.
Think for a minute about horror movies: In some of them, the little people rally and do heroic things and the monsters or aliens are vanquished. The forces that have come together against Prop. 23 are impressive, ranging from inner-city job coalitions and traditional environmental groups to university think tanks and business interests. Winning or losing, however, depends on what happens when California voters look at that deceptive label “California Jobs Initiative” on their ballots on Nov. 2.
If your heart isn’t pounding, and you aren’t biting your fingernails and teetering at the edge of your seat, then you haven’t noticed the monsters yet. Look carefully. They’re all around us -- and they’re coming for you.
Rebecca Solnit’s brother David does organizing work against Chevron, and she often shows up for the marches. She is the author of 13 books, including the forthcoming Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (which maps toxins and right-wing corporations in the Bay Area, among other things) and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She writes for Tomdispatch.com as often as she can. It’s her personal version of being David in the face of all those Goliaths. To catch Solnit discussing “mixed-up California” in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit
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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger used his appearance at the Commonwealth Club in Santa Clara today to "put a spotlight" on what he called the "self-serving greed" of oil companies Valero, Tesoro, and Koch Industries. These companies, two of which he described as among the state's top polluters, are bankrolling Proposition 23 for their own gain, while trying to hide behind a false claim that the initiative would be good for the state's economy, said the Governor. Prop 23 would suspend California's Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, which authorizes incentives and regulations for reducing the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020...
"They are creating a shell argument that this is about saving jobs," said Schwarzenegger. "Does anyone really believe that these companies, out of their black-oil hearts are really spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs? It's not about jobs at all. It's about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits."
He said that green jobs in California have grown ten times faster than the statewide average since 2005, and that they now comprise the single largest source of jobs in the state. Passing Prop. 23, would kill investment in the strongest sector of California's economy, said the Governor.
"The old oil companies are all out for Prop. 23. Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly against it," he said. "Which side do you believe our economic future as a nation is on?"
continued...
"This is a corruption of the democratic process," [Gov. Schwarzenegger] said. "Texas oil companies have descended upon California to overturn a California law...
"The effort is similar to the conspiracy hatched among oil companies in the 1920s to get rid of light rail systems. Then, the companies bought up the easements for light rail systems in 45 cities and then systematically dismantled them.
"Today, Valero and Tesoro are in a conspiracy. Not in a criminal conspiracy, but a cynical one about self-serving greed. Does anyone think in their black oil company hearts that they want to create jobs?
Valero and Tesoro want to stop the movement from old energy to new energy because its means lost market share...
"And while they're not creating a shale company, they are creating a shell argument that this is about saving jobs... it's not about jobs at all, ladies and gentlemen, it's about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits...
continued...
"Here's what they don't want to tell you. the cost calculations doesn't include the increased of cost doing business their way, the old way,
"They don't include the cost of rising oil prices as the developing world demands more and more oil.
"They don't include the costs of job losses that is rising oil prices will force.
"They don't include the costs of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks that have gotten and continued to get.
"They don't include the costs of pollution that are already causing -- the cost, for instance, to hundreds of thousands of Americans who die every year from smog-related diseases.
"They don't include also the cost of 6.5 million hospital visits a year for smog-related illnesses.
"They don't include the cost of the NEXT War over Oil.
"And believe me, eventually it will come as we become more and more dependent on Oil. I mean, I think that we have had enough wars in the Middle East because of Oil."
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Uh huh. What company do you work for, what does your plant manufacture, and where exactly is your plant located?
It appears the wind has shifted. California is now stuck was a punishing law that will burden our people with higher utility bills to pay for the sin of the whole world releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
I'm a Boomer hippie and we called this "dropping out". It's the solution, but few can do it.
Yes the earth has been warming for a very long, long, long time - the great lakes were formed by glaciers - Man's co2 emissions caused those glaciers to melt away - or was that just a few centuries ago.
No on Prop 23! It's no jobs initiative--not even close. It will destroy jobs in budding sectors of the energy industry like solar, wind, electric, and biodiesel (possibly from hemp if Prop 19 passes). California doesn't need the oil industry. We have abundant natural resources in the sun, the wind, the ocean, the soil, and our hard-working people. Send the oil industry back to Texas where their natural resources are limited. That's where it's home need be, not here in awesome California. We don't need them here. We need a sustainable energy industry in California--one that functions in harmony with the environment, not in opposition to it. Keep California green and clean! No on Prop 23! Yes on Prop 19!
MH: {{{ ... crickets ... }}}
So let's think about some interesting items above:
1--> Does Ms. Solnit think Californians are so stupid that they merely vote however they are told by the organization that spends the most money on political ads, or does she think that they can weigh the issues in light of current events and make informed choices?
2--> Notice that Ms. Solnit is silent on the fact that both the state of California AND an outside organization commissioned by the state to study the economic impacts of AB 32 (the bill mandating green technology) concluded that it will result in a net loss of jobs. This is similar to other situations like Spain, which poured money into "green" jobs only to watch its total employment shrink because of increased taxing and spending. Some people point to China, but China's investments will only pay off if other countries legally mandate green technology; not if it has to be cost effective.
3--> Nowhere does Ms. Solit mention California's 12+% unemployment (one-fifth higher than the national average of about 10%). Why does it make sense to increase the costs of doing business in a state hurting so badly for new private-market jobs?
Take no one seriously who presents a one-sided argument (for either side). Find the facts, discuss them all, and make a rational decision.
In the end, we won't need to mandate green technology because the depletion of liquid energy--oil and gas--will make it more expensive to bring to market and green technology will be mandated by the marketplace. So, if California wants to be at the forefront of that new energy market then it can't waste another day making its convergence to green technology and sustainable energy sources. Out with the old and in with the new--the sooner the better. California is not China. And, California's economy is larger than that of most countries. And, our natural resources are sustainable and abundant.
Although California's GSP is in the same range as the entire GDP of Spain, California is not like Spain. California is a state while Spain is a country--big diff in economic market structures.
When you start a business, you have a certain number of dollars. If you have to spend more money on electricity to run your business (or fuel to heat it, or fuel to drive to/from workplaces), you have less dollars to pay employees, pay taxes, expand, etc..
If California decides that Green Energy is so important that it is worth paying for, that forces both new and existing businesses to spend more money on energy, period. That puts the business at a disadvantage in two ways: first, you have less money in absolute terms. Second, many businesses have to compete with businesses in other states that don't have the same handicap. Ergo, you have a big problem.
Those new green jobs aren't free. The money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from people who would otherwise be using it for activities that will, overall, increase economic activity.
This is pretty basic economics here so far, nothing spectacular.
The only way that California actually comes out ahead is if either (1) they create a new process that's actually cheaper than existing alternatives, or (2) the rest of the world mandates green power. The first is unlikely given research spending and how far green fuels have to go. The second is just plain impossible today.
Thus, this is a job-destroyer for California (but a good deal for Texas and Nevada).
Apparently though my arguments were too good for you to find a single flaw though, right? I guess that makes it pretty clear who won that argument.
Thank you, thank you.